From Graham Hurley, Turnstone

He loved this place, not simply the waterfront but the city itself. He loved its busyness and its blunt, unvarnished ways. He loved the rough pulse of life that pumped through the pubs and endless terraced streets. Portsmouth wasn’t a city you’d choose for sparkling dinner parties or dainty conversation, and for those two blessings Faraday was eternally grateful. In a country which had largely sold its soul, it remained uncursed by money. (quoted with the kind permission of the author).

Graham Hurley (b. Nov. 1946, Clacton-on-Sea) is a leading figure in the British crime-writing scene, having written over 25 excellent novels. He has also worked extensively in television as an ITV producer and director, and produced a regular column for the Portsmouth News. Amongst his most famous literary series are the DI Faraday novels, set in Portsmouth and providing rich and highly sympathetic evocations of the city’s unusual character. Hurley is powerfully influenced by locations – from his childhood experiences of Clacton-on-Sea which have fostered an abiding love of grungy seaside resorts, to the flatness and huge skies of moody East Anglian landscapes, from the kibbutzes of the Golan Heights, experienced while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, to the Falkland Islands where Hurley spent ten years working on an ITV documentary about the 1982 conflict, and from Kerry and Donegal to the Galician coast landscapes that inspired his WWII series The Wars Within. Hurley’s experience of the French Touraine region have inspired another series, the second novel of which, Sight Unseen appeared in 2019.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk